by Joël Dicker
“So what did you do?” I asked.
“For Nola? I refused. I told her I didn’t want to get mixed up in this thing, and that I couldn’t do anything even if I wanted to. I told her the letter was in the safe, and that the only key that opened it hung on a chain around my wife’s neck, day and night. There was nothing to be done. She begged me; she said that if the police got their hands on that note, Harry would get into serious trouble, that his career would be wrecked, that he would maybe even go to prison, when he hadn’t done anything wrong. I remember the fire in her eyes, the way she spoke, her body language … the passion she felt for him was so intense. I remember she said to me: ‘They’re going to ruin everything, Mr Quinn! The people of this town are completely crazy! It reminds me of that play we read in school by Arthur Miller, “The Crucible.” Have you read it?’ Her eyes became wet with tiny tears, about to overflow and stream down her cheeks. I had read that play. I remember the fuss when it opened on Broadway, right in the middle of the Rosenberg affair. It gave me shivers at the time because the Rosenbergs had young kids too, and I remember wondering what would happen to Jenny if I were executed. I felt so relieved that I wasn’t a Communist.”
“Why did Nola come to you about this?”
“Probably because she imagined I had access to the safe. But that wasn’t the case. As I said, my wife was the only person with a key. She kept it on a chain around her neck, dangling between her breasts. And I had not had access to her breasts for a long time.”
I ignored this. “So what happened?”
“Nola flattered me. She said: ‘You’re so clever. You’ll find a way.’ So I ended up agreeing. I told her I would try.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Why? Because of love. As I said, she was only fifteen, but she told me about things that I had never known and that I probably will never know. Even if, truth be told, her affair with Harry made me want to throw up. I did it for her, not for him. And I asked her how she intended to deal with Chief Pratt. Because, proof or no proof, Chief Pratt now knew everything. She looked me in the eyes and said: ‘I’m going to stop him from getting involved. I’m going to make him a criminal.’ At the time I didn’t understand what she meant. And then when Pratt was arrested this summer, I realized what she meant.”
Wednesday, August 6, 1975
Without discussing it, both Nola and Robert took action the day after their conversation. Around 5 p.m., in a Concord pharmacy, Robert Quinn bought sleeping pills. At the same moment, in the police station, Nola was on her knees in Chief Pratt’s office, attempting to protect Harry by turning Pratt into a criminal, setting off what would become for him a thirty-three-year downward spiral.
That night Tamara slept like a log. After dinner she was so tired that she went to bed without even removing her makeup. She collapsed in a heap on the bed and fell into a deep sleep. It happened so quickly that Robert briefly feared he might have put too strong a dose in her glass of water and accidentally killed her, but he was immediately reassured by the magnificent snores that escaped his wife’s open mouth every seven seconds. He waited until after midnight before acting: He had to be sure that Jenny was asleep, and that no-one would see him in town. When the time came, he gave his wife a good shake to make sure she was definitely asleep. He was very happy when she didn’t stir. For the first time, he felt powerful: The dragon, sprawled on her mattress, no longer frightened anyone. He unhooked the chain from around her neck and triumphantly took the key. Since he was down there anyway, he squeezed and fondled her breasts, but he noticed with regret that this had no effect on him whatsoever.
He left the house without making a noise, then borrowed his daughter’s bicycle so as not to risk someone hearing his car. Pedaling through the night, the keys to Clark’s and to the safe in his pocket, he felt a rising excitement at the prospect of breaking the rules. He no longer knew whether he was doing this to help Nola or to annoy his wife. And he felt so free on this bicycle, riding fast across town, that he decided to divorce Tamara. Jenny was now an adult; there was no longer any reason for him to stay with his wife. He’d had enough of that damn harpy; he wanted a new life. He deliberately took a few wrong turns in order to prolong this heady feeling. When he got to the main street, he walked his bike so he would have time to look around. The town was sleeping peacefully. There was no light and no noise. He leaned his bike against a wall, opened the door to Clark’s, and crept inside, the restaurant illuminated only by streetlights whose glare filtered through the windows. He reached the office—the office he had never been allowed to enter without his wife’s permission. Well, now he was the master. He violated its borders, he invaded its space; it became conquered territory. He turned on the flashlight he had brought and began by exploring the files on the shelves. He had been dreaming of searching through this place for years. What could his wife be hiding here? He grabbed various folders and skimmed their contents, surprising himself when he realized that he was looking for love letters. He thought his wife was probably cheating on him. How could she make do with only him? But all he found was purchase orders and balance sheets. So he moved on to the safe. It was made of steel and must have been at least three feet tall, mounted on a wooden pallet. He slid the key into the lock, turned it, and shivered as he heard the mechanism click into place. He pulled open the heavy door and pointed the flashlight beam inside. The safe consisted of four shelves. This was the first time he had seen it open; he was trembling with excitement.
On the first shelf he found financial documents: the latest bank statement, payment receipts, and employee pay slips.
On the second shelf he found a tin box containing Clark’s change fund and another containing the small amount of cash necessary to pay suppliers.
On the third shelf he found a piece of wood that looked like a bear. He smiled. It was the first present he had given to Tamara from the first time they had really gone out together. He had carefully prepared for that moment for weeks beforehand, putting in extra hours at the gas station where he worked to pay for his studies so he could take his Tammy to one of the best restaurants in the area, Chez Jean-Claude, a French place where the lobster was supposedly to die for. He had studied the menu and worked out exactly how much it would cost him if she ordered the most expensive dishes; he had saved up until he had that much money, and then he had invited her. That night, when he picked her up from her parents’ house and told her where they were going, she had begged him not to break the bank for her. ‘Oh, Robert, you’re so sweet. But it’s too much—it really is,’ she had said. And to persuade him to give up his plan, she had suggested they go to a little Italian restaurant in Concord that she had long been tempted by. They had eaten spaghetti, they had drunk Chianti and the house grappa, and, slightly intoxicated, they had gone to a nearby carnival. On the way home they had stopped by the ocean and waited for sunrise. Walking along the beach, he had found a piece of wood that resembled a bear and had given it to her when she held him tight in the first rays of dawn. She had said she would always keep it, and she had kissed him for the first time.
Continuing his exploration of the safe, Robert was touched to find, next to the piece of wood, a number of photographs of himself taken throughout the years. On the back of each Tamara had scribbled a few annotations, even the most recent ones. The latest was from April, when they had gone to a horse race. It was of Robert, binoculars to his eyes, narrating the action. On the back Tamara had written: My Robert, still in love with life. I will love him until my dying breath.
In addition to the photographs, there were mementos of their life together: their wedding invitation, Jenny’s birth announcement, vacation snapshots, little things he had thought had been thrown away years ago: cheap gifts, a plastic brooch, a souvenir ballpoint pen, and those snake-shaped paperweights he had bought on a vacation in Canada and that had earned him nothing but an acerbic telling off: “For God’s sake, Bobbo, what were you thinking, buying such crap? What am I supposed to do with them?” An
d yet, here they were, kept like sacred objects in this safe. Robert began to think that what his wife kept hidden here was her heart. And he wondered why.
On the fourth shelf he found a thick, leather-bound notebook, which he opened: Tamara’s journal. His wife kept a journal. He had never known. He opened it at random and read by flashlight:
January 1, 1975
Celebrated New Year’s Eve at the Richardsons’.
Rating, 1 to 10: 5. Food wasn’t great, and the Richardsons are boring people. I had never noticed that before. I think New Year’s Eve is a good test to find out which of your friends are boring. Bobbo quickly saw that I was bored, and he tried to entertain me. He clowned around, telling jokes and pretending to make his crab talk. How the Richardsons laughed! Paul Richardson even got up from the table to note down one of Bobbo’s jokes. He said he wanted to make sure he remembered it. As for me, all I managed to do was argue with Bobbo. In the car on the way home, I said terrible things. I said: “Nobody thinks your jokes are funny. They’re in bad taste. You’re pathetic. Who asked you to play the fool? You’re an engineer in a big factory, aren’t you? So talk about your job, show them you’re someone serious and important. You’re not in the circus, for God’s sake!” He replied that Paul had laughed at his jokes, and I told him to shut up. I said I didn’t want to hear him speak anymore.
I don’t know why I have to be so nasty. I love him so much. He is so sweet and thoughtful. I don’t know why I behave so badly with him. Afterward I feel guilty and I hate myself, and then I treat him even more badly.
But today is New Year’s Day, so I am making a resolution to change. Well, I make this resolution every year and never keep it. Dr Ashcroft suggested I keep this journal. Maybe it’ll help me keep my resolutions. Nobody knows about Dr Ashcroft. I would be so ashamed if anyone knew I was going to see a psychiatrist. People would say I was crazy. I’m not crazy. I’m suffering. I am suffering, but from what, I don’t know. Dr Ashcroft says I have a tendency to destroy everything that’s good for me. He says I have a fear of death and that this is perhaps connected. All I know is that I’m suffering. And that I love my Robert. He is all I love. What would I be without him?
Robert closed the journal, crying now. His wife had written what she had never been able to tell him. She loved him. She truly loved him. She loved only him. He thought that these were the most beautiful words he had ever read. He wiped his cheeks so his tears would not stain the pages, and kept reading. Poor Tamara, darling Tamara, suffering in silence. Why had she never told him about this Dr Ashcroft? If she was suffering, he wanted to suffer with her; that was why he had married her. Sweeping the last shelf with the flashlight’s beam, he found Harry’s note and was brought back to reality with a bump. He remembered his mission; he remembered that his wife was sprawled out on her bed, in a drug-induced sleep, and that he had to get rid of this piece of paper. He suddenly felt bad about what he was doing. He was about to give up the idea when it occurred to him that getting rid of this letter might make his wife less obsessed with Harry Quebert and more concerned with him. He was the one who mattered; she loved him. This was what finally pushed him to take the note and to leave Clark’s in the silence of the night, having first made certain that he had left behind no trace of his trespass. He crossed the town on his bicycle and, in a quiet back alley, he used his lighter to set fire to Harry Quebert’s words. He watched the piece of paper burn, turn brown, twist up in a flame that flared up and slowly disappeared. Soon nothing remained of it. He went home, returned the key to its habitual place between his wife’s breasts, lay down next to her, and embraced her for a long time.
It took Tamara two days to realize that the note was no longer in the safe. She thought she was going crazy. She was certain she had put it in the safe, and yet it was not there. Nobody could have gotten into the safe: she kept the key with her, and there hadn’t been a break-in. Had she mislaid it somewhere in the office? Had she unthinkingly stashed it away in another place? She spent hours searching the room, emptying and refilling folders, sorting through papers and filing them again … all in vain. That tiny piece of paper had mysteriously vanished.
*
Robert Quinn told me that when Nola disappeared a few weeks later, his wife took it very badly.
“She kept repeating that if she still had the note the police would be able to investigate Harry. And Chief Pratt told her that, without that piece of paper, he couldn’t do anything. She said to me over and over again: ‘It’s Quebert, it’s Quebert! I know it, you know it, we all know it. You saw that note as well as I did.’”
“Why didn’t you tell the police what you knew?” I asked. “Why not say that Nola came to find you and that she told you about Harry? Wasn’t that worth investigating?”
“I wanted to. I was torn. Could you turn off your recorder, Mr Goldman?”
“Of course.”
I turned off the device and put it back in my bag.
He went on. “When Nola disappeared, I blamed myself. I regretted burning the piece of paper that linked her to Harry. I thought that, if they’d had that note, the police could have interrogated Harry, dug deeper into the whole thing. And that if he hadn’t done anything wrong, he wouldn’t have anything to fear. After all, if someone’s innocent, he has nothing to worry about, does he? So, anyway, I felt bad. So I started writing anonymous letters, which I stuck to his door when I knew he was away.”
“It was you who wrote those letters?”
“It was me. I’d prepared several of them, using my secretary’s typewriter at the glove factory in Concord. ‘I know what you’ve done with that 15-year-old girl. And soon the whole town will know.’ I kept the letters in the glove compartment of my car. And each time I saw Harry in town, I drove to Goose Cove to leave a letter.”
“But why?”
“To ease my conscience. My wife never stopped talking about how Harry was guilty, and it seemed plausible to me. I thought that if I scared him, he would end up confessing. That went on for a few months. And then I stopped.”
“What made you stop?”
“The way he looked. After she disappeared, he looked so sad. He wasn’t the same man anymore. I decided it couldn’t have been him. So I finally gave up.”
I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. As a long shot, I asked him: “Tell me, Mr Quinn, it wasn’t by any chance you who set fire to Goose Cove, was it?”
He smiled, almost amused by my question.
“No. You’re a nice guy, Mr Goldman. I wouldn’t do that. I don’t know who did that, but whoever he is, he’s sick.”
We drained our beers.
“So, in fact,” I said, “you didn’t get divorced in the end. Did things get better with your wife? After you found all those mementos in the safe, I mean, and her diary?”
“Things got worse and worse, Mr Goldman. She never stopped nagging and scolding me, and she never told me she loved me. Never. In the months and then the years that followed, I would often drug her with sleeping pills so I could go read her journals and cry over our mementos, hoping that one day things would be better. Maybe that’s what love is: hoping that one day things will be better.”
I nodded. “Maybe.”
*
In my suite at the hotel, I redoubled my efforts on the book. I wrote about how Nola Kellergan, fifteen years old, had done everything she could to protect Harry. The sacrifices she had made so he could stay in that house and write, untroubled. How she had gradually become both the muse and the keeper of his masterpiece. How she had managed to create a sort of bubble around him, allowing him to concentrate on his writing and to produce the greatest work of his life. And the more I wrote, the more I began to believe that Nola Kellergan might even have been that extraordinary woman of whom writers all over the world undoubtedly dream.
One afternoon Denise called me from New York, where she was typing up my words with uncommon devotion and efficiency, and said: “Marcus, I think I’m crying.”
“W
hy?” I asked.
“Because of that young girl, that Nola. I think I love her too.”
I smiled and said, “I think everyone loved her, Denise. Everyone.”
Then, two days later—on August 3—I received a call from Gahalowood, who was beside himself with excitement.
“Hey, writer!” he bellowed. “I got the lab results. Jesus, you won’t believe this. The writing on the manuscript really is Luther Caleb’s! Without any doubt at all. We’ve got our man, Marcus. We’ve got our man!”
7
After Nola
“Cherish love, Marcus. Make it your greatest conquest, your sole ambition. After men, there will be other men. After books, there will be other books. After glory, there will be other glories. After money, there will be yet more money. But after love, Marcus, after love, there is nothing but the salt from tears.”
Life after Nola was no longer life. Everyone said in the months that followed her disappearance, the town of Somerset sank slowly into depression, obsessed by the fear of a second abduction.
It was fall, and the leaves had changed color. But the town’s children were no longer able to throw themselves with abandon into the huge piles of dead leaves swept to the sides of the streets; their parents watched them constantly, afraid. From now on they would wait with them before they caught the school bus and would be there again when the bus dropped them off in the afternoon. At 3.30 every afternoon, the sidewalks were lined with mothers, one in front of each house, forming a human fence along the empty avenues, impassive sentinels watching over the arrival of their progeny.